When an organization first introduces document automation to their Salesforce stack, some immediate benefits are crystal clear. Efficiency and productivity skyrocket as your team is able to focus on high-value tasks that no longer vie for time against tedious document creation workflows.
A good document automation strategy won’t just move the needle on productivity, though. You’ll see a variety of organizational facets strengthened when you remove the manual component from your invoices, proposals, contracts, and other mission-critical documents. Key among these surprising benefits is increased security and compliance. Since 88% of IT professionals agree that having to meet compliance standards can hinder cloud adoption, these benefits are vital as more enterprises move to the cloud.
So how does Salesforce document automation make a positive impact on your organization’s data security? To find out, let’s take a look at what document automation really means.
What Is Document Automation?
Document automation is the process by which document templates are automatically formatted and populated with data based on predefined rules. Using document generation solutions like S-Docs, these rules can be based on any platform-triggering event in Salesforce, such as a record update. The data used to create documents can come from anywhere in Salesforce.
Document automation can encompass everything from complete automation, such as invoices being generated and emailed based on an Account’s renewal date, to partial automation, such as certain templates being preselected for a user based on their assigned permissions.
You may not realize it, but we’ve just described two of the most important security benefits provided by document automation: reproducibility and least-privilege isolation. Document automation allows for identical and repeatable results, and ensures users (or systems) can only generate and send the documents that they absolutely need to.
This article will examine these security benefits and more of implementing a Salesforce document automation solution.
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5 Security And Compliance Benefits of Document Automation
As more and more security-conscious industries move to the cloud, their documents move too. Companies in the healthcare, government, and financial services industries need to be sure that their sensitive information isn’t at risk when it comes to document creation. Luckily, document automation for Salesforce offers several key cybersecurity benefits.
1. Reproducibility
One of the most important benefits of document automation is that it is based on clearly defined rules. No matter what your criteria is, you’ll know exactly which conditions documents can be generated under, every time.
This is important for several reasons. For one, repeatable processes are easier to manage and secure. When you take other aspects of your org’s security into consideration, it’s much easier to factor in automated processes than spontaneous user input. Additionally, it’s easier to track issues when your processes are reproducible. Should something go wrong, IT will have a much easier time pinpointing the source and tweaking the process when that process is automated.
2. The Principle of Least Privilege
The principle of least privilege is a security concept stating that users should receive the minimum system access necessary to perform their job. This limits the surface area for data breaches should a user make a mistake or abuse their privileges. Document automation applies this concept to an organization’s documentation requirements.
Document automation allows you to set the specific conditions under which documents can be created, including conditions that dictate which users have access to generate and email which documents. Depending on your organization’s security policies, you can make these as open or restrictive as necessary. User compliance can become a nonissue when documents containing sensitive information are only created under clearly-defined circumstances.
3. Minimized Human Error
While your team is your most valuable resource, the fact of the matter is that humans make mistakes. According to a CybSafe analysis, human error was the cause of 90% of data breaches in 2019. For organizations that need to generate documents with confidential information, there’s simply no room for human error.
Luckily, automated processes are about as airtight as they come. Using the right business rules, document automation can save you from the following situations and more:
- Sending sensitive information to the wrong contact
- Accidentally emailing an internal document to an external contact
- Providing an incorrect quote or invoice to a client
- Including the wrong clause in a contract
Document automation solutions like S-Docs don’t just pull all of the relevant data directly from Salesforce -- they also include or exclude certain fields, lists, and even entire document pages based on the state of the record(s) that they’re grabbing data from. The risk of human-caused data leaks drops to near zero with Salesforce document automation.
4. Secure Document Storage
Document automation solutions allow for a seamless transition from database to storage solution. Once your document is automatically created, it can be automatically filed away in the storage repository of your choice without any user input required. This eliminates the need for an individual to download a document for transfer between different systems, which would create more surface area for document misplacement or leakage.
This also enables you to fine-tune which documents can be transferred between systems, and which must stay within Salesforce.
5. Standardized Sensitive Documents
Whether they contain sensitive information or need to be formatted according to organizational policies, certain documents aren’t open to being changed. From legal contracts to government forms, every organization must create certain documents that need to come out the same way, every time.
Since document automation solutions rely on pre-made document templates, there’s no need to worry about messed-up formatting or leaving out the non-compete clause. Your documents will be standardized from the get-go, and compliance with your document policies will hit 100% as all documents are automatically created in accordance with your guidelines.
The Native Advantage
These five security and compliance benefits of document automation are certain to boost your organization’s data security, increase document policy compliance, and put IT teams at ease when it comes to cloud adoption.
Now take it a step further by choosing 100% native document automation apps like S-Docs. Native Salesforce apps are built directly on the Salesforce platform, which means they’re executed and delivered 100% within the Salesforce cloud.
While non-native document automation solutions offer many of the security benefits listed above, the fact remains that they must transfer your data outside of Salesforce for processing before creating documents and sending them back to your org. When your data changes hands, it becomes much more vulnerable.
When you automate your document workflows with S-Docs, your data never leaves Salesforce. Everything is securely processed within your org with zero reliance on external servers. If you already trust Salesforce, you can be confident that your data is secure when you use native apps. To top it all off, native apps work faster since they don’t need to make API calls between clouds, and they’re easier to use since they mirror the look and feel of Salesforce.
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Get Started With S-Docs Today
Ready to start increasing your organization’s efficiency and security with native document automation? Our team of experts would love to hear from you! For a customized demo that will show you all S-Docs has to offer, request a demo or shoot us an email at sales@sdocs.com.
